


Strangers

by jbkjnf



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-14
Updated: 2017-11-14
Packaged: 2019-02-02 13:36:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12727581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jbkjnf/pseuds/jbkjnf
Summary: Betty had to get away. Black Hood destroyed any hope and emotional or mental stability she had. So she left Riverdale without saying goodbye.It's been two years since she lived in Riverdale. Can she handle being back home?





	Strangers

**Author's Note:**

> so i told myself year ago that i would never write fanfiction again…  
> but i heard a song and i couldn’t help but write something little… tiny .. itty bitty…
> 
> please be kind…im rusty.
> 
> So, here’s a little something based of off or inspired by this lyric “Please don’t ever become a stranger, whose laugh I could recognize anywhere”

Betty’s knuckles were solid white as she gripped the grocery cart. This was her first time out since she moved back to Riverdale. This is the first time she has been to Riverdale in the past two years, since Black Hood was caught. 

After he was caught, Betty was no longer emotionally or mentally stable to be by herself or stay alone in her room without having a serious panic attacks, which would leave her completely breathless and her pulse pounding. Almost to the point where she needed to be put in an ambulance and rushed to the emergency room. Her body would shake and her mind would race. She wouldn’t be able to see straight or find her footing to keep standing. 

Her mother suggested that she move away, for a while, to a place that could help with her anxiety and let her finish school. A type of boarding school. Riverdale did not have any good doctors or psychiatrists and the ones that Riverdale did have were always booked with everyone else from the town. Black Hood was treacherous and vicious in his last few murders, almost as if it was a Freddy Krueger movie and Betty could not handle knowing that she had some play in it because of Black Hood’s threats and manipulation. 

So, she left. It took her a little longer to finish school than it should had. While everyone in Riverdale graduated high school at the end of May, she didn’t finish her last class till the end September and moved back home. It was better for her to finish later anyway, because now everyone was away at college. Archie, Veronica, Kevin, once her close knit group of friends, they were nowhere to be seen. She didn’t talk to them much while she was away. She didn’t talk much at all to anyone. She tried to keep her distance, because talking to them brought back hard memories and flashbacks. She wasn’t ready to face them, yet, but hopefully, by the holiday break she would be. 

The display of black ski masks stared back at her in the middle of the grocery store. The weatherman had called for an early winter, even though it was currently sunny summer weather outside. She felt her pulse race and her breathing pick up inching closer to hyperventilating. 

_Walk away. Do not make a scene. Look away. Do not have a panic att- Dammit, Betty just look away. Black Hood does not exist anymore. He’s locked up! He’s gone!_ She thought to herself. But seeing the ski mask flooded her brain with memories of the dark gloomy house in the woods. She remembers how hard it was to look through the eye holes of the hood and how her own reflection in the mirror was distorted and made her want to vomit. 

Betty jumped and looked away from the masks as a little kid ran into her grocery cart throwing a bag of chips into it. He giggled and looked up at her with wide green eyes, dark curly hair and a bright smile.

“Ryan, you cannot run into people and put things in their grocery cart,” a lady ran over to the little boy. “Oh my gosh, I am sorry. I don’t what has gotten into him.” She spoke to Betty and reached for the chips that was put within the cart. 

Betty smiled, “its okay. I actually like those and was planning to get them.” 

The lady gave a quick smile with an “okay” and pulled her son away quietly scolding him. 

Betty’s smiled faded as she glanced but over to the ski masks. She shook her head and began walking towards the self-checkout line. She didn’t want to deal with any more people today. Maybe going to the grocery store was too much, maybe too soon.

_“Betty, why don’t you just stay home? You only just arrived yesterday. You don’t want to over work yourself. I can go,” her mother said to her about two hours earlier. “It’s only a couple things, Mom. I can do it.” Betty argued back._

Maybe she was right. It took Betty 15 minutes to just start the car and leave the driveway and another 20 minutes to actually enter the grocery store. She dodge any aisle that had a person down it and kept her face looking down so she didn’t make eye contact with anyone.

Betty gripped the handle of the paper grocery bag as she walked back into the parking lot. The warm air engulfing her with comfort till she noticed a couple motorcycles parked a few spots from her own car. 

_Motorcycles._ She thought to herself. They only remaindered her of Jughead. Her heart began to ache with a familiar agonizing pain, one that seems to leave only for a few moments and then slowly creep back in. 

_Juggie. Two years. I haven’t seen him or heard from in two years._ She longed to hear from him. Hoped that he would have contacted her after she left. But she understood. She is the one that broke up with him. _Temporary_ , at first. She never got to see him. To traumatized from the Black Hood and her phone taken into police custody. 

She adverted her eyes from the motorcycles feeling tears begin to weld up in her eyes. She couldn’t look for him now. It had been too long. He had moved on. A serpent now according to Archie, but she wouldn’t care. Yet, that doesn’t matter. Two years is a long time and she missed any opportunity that she might have –

A deep chuckle stopped her in tracks. She recognized that laugh, one she heard oh so many time before, but now, it was one from a stranger. Someone she had not seen in a long time. She glanced quickly to the motorcycles. No one to been seen around them, but she did notice a green serpent in the shape of an “S” on the rear fender of one of them. 

She swallowed hard with a tear falling from her eye. The paper bag slipped from her hand smashing to the group breaking the glass jar of jelly inside.

“Betty Cooper?” the voice spoke her name so smoothly giving her images of the last time that she saw this man in person. The time where he wished that they could run away together like _Romeo and Juliet but we live happily ever after instead._


End file.
